Here’s a scene almost everyone recognizes: you need a note, a reply, a bit of code, a recommendation. You ask an AI, it hands you something plausible, and you paste it into an email or a comment without reading it. That is an AI slap, and the person doing the slapping—the one who forwards AI-generated output without reading, understanding, or validating it—is what Prof. Dan Weld’s helpful glossary calls a meat proxy. It stings, mostly because you know you’ve been that proxy at least once. The AI era has been with us long enough to develop its own vocabulary, some of it official, some of it invented on the fly, and almost all of it complaining. Weld and his co-author collected more than 35 terms to make sense of the nontechnical lingo of artificial intelligence, from the silly to the sinister. Start with slop, which Merriam-Webster made its 2025 word of the year: low-quality digital content produced in quantity by AI. The specimen is Shrimp Jesus, Christ fused with crustaceans, posted to Facebook by the thousands. The rare and hopeful opposite is AI cream, superb writing created with AI’s help; the hope is that the cream rises and the slop sinks. Until then, we have the meat proxy and the AI slap, along with a website called Your AI Slop Bores Me, where you type a prompt and a randomly chosen human answers it while pretending to be a chatbot. It got fifty million views in a week, which tells you how badly people wanted to say something back. There is also AI suspicion, the nagging feeling that what you’re reading was generated by a machine—also known as the Turing tingle or the AI-dar. The accusation that follows is AI shaming, a way of attacking someone’s work by insinuating a machine wrote it. The paper that named it is subtitled “Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work,” and it argues that such accusations fall hardest on racial minorities and on writers whose first language isn’t English. Add the spinoffs—tasteslop, workslop, slopaganda—and you have a full menu of digital decay.
The next cluster of terms is darker because it moves from annoyance to deception. A deepfake is a video or recording altered by machine learning so that a real person appears to say or do something they never said or did. The word was born in late 2017 from the Reddit user who called himself deepfakes, which means the term we all use for AI deception descends from an anonymous pornographer’s handle. The deception doesn’t end with the fake. The liar’s dividend is the payoff a real wrongdoer collects once any authentic recording can be waved off as a fake; the damage isn’t only the fake video, it’s that real video stops counting. The late philosopher Daniel Dennett made this his final argument: machines able to pass as human are, in his words, “the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself.” He wanted them outlawed and watermarked like banknotes. The future he warned about is already visible in surreal news items. Tilly Norwood is an AI actress unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival in September 2025, and her makers said talent agents wanted to sign her. Emily Blunt, shown a picture, reportedly said, “Good Lord, we’re screwed,” and told the agencies to stop. And yet most of the damage doesn’t even need AI. A cheapfake is manipulation made with cheap software or no software at all. Chatfishing is using AI to write your messages on a dating app, where the con used to be a fake photo and is now a rented personality. The technology is new, but the human impulse behind it is ancient: to present a version of yourself that isn’t you, and to profit from someone who believes it.
Politics gives the AI era its most chilling vocabulary. The Nerd Reich is a name for the Silicon Valley billionaires and venture capitalists who think democracy is finished and want corporate rule in its place. Gil Durán’s book, subtitled Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, traces the idea back to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual and to Peter Thiel’s circle, which Durán says believes “technology means democracy is an obsolete software system.” Durán didn’t coin the phrase; someone in the crypto world told him they’d been using it for years. The people in question are the broligarchy—a small group of extremely wealthy men, particularly in technology, who wield significant political and economic power. The word sat on Twitter from 2009 and went nowhere until Carole Cadwalladr wrote about “a new super-class of broligarchs” in July 2024. Add technofeudalism to the mix, and the picture gets even more feudal: instead of democratic institutions accountable to citizens, we get platforms accountable to no one, with algorithms that act like digital landlords extracting rent from every interaction. The nightmare isn’t just that a few men own everything. It’s that the rest of us live on their platforms, subject to their whims, while the language of politics becomes a language of concentrated and unaccountable power. The stakes of the AI era were always about who controls the machines; these terms name what happens when the machines’ owners believe the rest of us are just part of the interface.
On the receiving end, the mental and cultural toll has a name: brain rot. Oxford University Press chose it as its 2024 word of the year, but Thoreau got there first, in Walden in 1854, complaining that England was busy curing the potato-rot while nobody was curing the brain-rot. The supply side is the dead internet theory, the theory that a lot of the internet is no longer created by real people but rather by bots and other AI tools. It started as a forum post in January 2021 and has quietly become a description of the present. The business model behind it all is enshittification, Cory Doctorow’s three-stage decay: first platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. That’s how the web feels now: every product update is an AI feature, every customer service chat is a bot, every piece of content is generated, and every click leaves you feeling slightly more exhausted. That exhaustion has its own term: AI fatigue, the sense of being overwhelmed by the rapid proliferation and constant engagement with AI technologies. The phrase has been drifting through the trade press since 2023, no author attached, which seems appropriate because it’s a collective condition. You feel it when you can’t tell if you’re reading a person or a model, when every trend is a hype cycle, when the future arrives too fast to process. Brain rot, the dead internet, enshittification, AI fatigue—these are not just words. They are symptoms.
Then there is the strange, addictive experience of actually trying to make things with AI. The centerpiece term is vibe coding, Andrej Karpathy’s February 2025 coinage, crowned Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2025. It means fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists—accepting whatever diff the AI hands you without reading it. That bliss never lasts. The hangover is promptatory, a portmanteau of prompt and purgatory, for the state of being trapped in an unending edit-and-re-prompt loop with an AI system. You fix a bug the AI introduced, and in fixing it, the AI introduces two more, each smaller and more absurd than the last. Progress is hard earned: you close in on “done” like the runner in Zeno’s paradox, forever eating the remaining distance in half. Promptatory is vibe coding’s hangover: the vibe wears off, and the rereading begins. A related condition is agentsomnia, the chronic inability to rest or disconnect from work, driven by the haunting feeling that your autonomous software agents are stalled without your feedback. The Wall Street Journal calls it agent FOMO. And then there’s the grand vision of it all. “Feel the AGI” was an OpenAI rallying cry; AGI, artificial general intelligence, is the point where a machine can do any intellectual task a person can, and the phrase became a general exclamation for the moment a model does something that rearranges your sense of what’s coming. Ilya Sutskever used it inside the company and posted it publicly in 2022. It works as celebration and as diagnosis. P(doom) runs the other direction: your personal probability that AI ends the world, stated as a number so the vibe feels like math. It started as shorthand among a small online community in 2022 and now gets asked at dinner parties. The hype also has units. Bragawatts, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is a unit of measurement for boasting, the practice of AI companies boasting about very large projects to create excitement and attract investment, even though many of these projects are never completed. Vibe revenue does the same thing to the income statement: money or funding that an AI company is given because people are excited about the potential of AI, rather than because the company’s products are already successful. It’s a little like paying for a house because someone showed you a beautiful drawing of it.
The most intimate terms describe what happens when the machine becomes a companion. Parasocial is a one-sided relationship with someone who doesn’t know you exist. Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined it in 1956 about television viewers, but Cambridge Dictionary made it the 2025 word of the year, citing celebrities, influencers, and chatbots. A seventy-year-old term about Ed Sullivan turns out to describe your relationship with ChatGPT. When the one-sided relationship takes over, it becomes AI addiction. A 2026 study sorted it into three kinds: escapist roleplay, where people come to prefer the world the chatbot builds; pseudosocial companionship, where it replaces real relationships; and the epistemic rabbit hole, compulsive question-asking that crowds out everything else. The researchers blamed the design and called the chatbot an AI genie, a thing that gives you exactly what you want with minimal effort. The far end is AI psychosis, a phrase suggested by the Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard in a 2023 editorial in Schizophrenia Bulletin, describing paranoia and delusions in connection with chatbot use. It isn’t a recognized clinical diagnosis, and it should be said plainly. Almost every phrase above names a problem: slop, shaming, deepfakes, brain rot, psychosis. The AI era has added to English a vocabulary of complaint. There is still no common word for AI doing something genuinely well. We’ve offered AI cream. If you have a candidate for a phrase we’re missing, send it in. The language is still being written, and right now it sounds a lot like us trying to hold on to what makes us human.
